Stashed Away: Chevy Babe

Besides protecting our precious vinyl, record sleeves have long doubled as in-home safety deposit boxes where people stash anything from letters to drugs, ticket stubs to pornography. It’s a common enough phenomenon that the Roach Stashed Away from the Kids/Parents is a cultural trope.

It should come as no surprise that here at Shuga, we stumble upon these forgotten artifacts with a regular frequency while cleaning and inspecting thousands of used records. Unfortunately, we don’t always have the foresight to record which albums these guys fall out of due to the volume we process or because they literally fall out from a stack of records as we carry them from here to there. With that disclaimer I present to you Chevy Babe:

Adam found this a few weeks ago. The image shows a young woman next to what I think is a Chevy Camaro Vega (someone who is car savvy, please feel free to correct this). Lost pictures like this one endlessly fascinate me, oscillating from creeped out to touched while pondering all the scenarios. What were they doing in the woods? Is this woman still alive? The photographer? Where were they going or coming from? Is her soft smile one of adoration for the photographer? Seems like a pitch for Mystery Show.

Whatever the story, the picture was important enough to be saved from a hasty move or spring cleaning and thrown into a record sleeve where it should have been safe until it was eventually forgotten about.